Mama Samia provides dash of Dar hospitality to top Kenyan activists

Human rights activist Boniface Mwangi at the Moi International Airport in Mombasa, on May 22, 2025. He was dumped in Horohoro after detention in Tanzania. [Kelvin Karani, Standard]

Shikamoo, Mama Samia Suluhu Hassan. I am using these honorific titles very deliberately; I understand you berated Kenyans for being “mannerless,” an attribute that the Kenyan government supports.

Allow me to invoke the principle of national sovereignty, so that I keep you out of our internal affairs, same way you detest our interference in your own. Let’s just say I consider the Government of Kenya to be bure kabisa, and I don’t mean that disparagingly.

So, I will not interrogate the pronouncements made by Musalia Mudavadi aka Ma-DvD, Kenya’s Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary, among many other lofty titles that don’t mean much, because what he said on TV was a pack of crap.

The only commentary that I can offer about Ma-DvD is that he provides plenty of comic relief, which means I consider him a joke. You just need to look at his cheeks, puffed up, like a saxophonist’s, though the anatomy that he draws our attention to, are his hands.

He brands himself as a “safe pair of hands,” meaning he will do nothing to disrupt the status quo, a viewpoint that he propounded with such vigour this week, for a moment I thought he had switched sides to represent Tanzania.

So, instead of protesting the shabby treatment of Kenyan nationals who were illegally detained in Dar, before being deported, Ma-DvD suggested that our compatriots called it upon themselves by daring to visit at this period of “emotive” electioneering.

I didn’t know Dar politics to be that consuming, especially since you practically have no opposition to contend with, following the jailing of Tundu Lissu, the leader of Chadema. I understand that’s the case that the Kenyan contingent, many of them lawyers, intended to observe, as guests of the East African Law Society.

This delegation included my friend Bonnie Mwangi, who was flushed out of his hotel room in the dead of night by men purporting to be police officers who represent your government.

For several days, nobody knew of his whereabouts. And nobody in Dar was in the mood to speak, not after you delivered that severe rebuke about Kenyans’ mannerlessness.

I am not sure if you are familiar with the declaration on Page 1 of the East African Community passport, like the one that Bonnie had. It states: “This is to request and require in the Name of the President of the Republic of Kenya all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.”

I was about to ask which element of this declaration you don’t understand, but I restrained myself because that would be construed as rude. It means Bonnie is/ was guaranteed a free pass within the membership of EAC because the law guarantees it.

Ma-DvD claimed he did not wish to “rattle” the feathers of TZ authorities, the proper word is “ruffle,” and I shall correct him because I am mannerless, but I don’t think it’s an insult for Bonnie to say you run a dictatorship.

I mean, we say that about Prezzo Bill Ruto all the time. That’s just the way we Kenyans are.

In any case, it is tendencies like the ones Dar demonstrated this week that earn administrations such assessments.

So, allow me to conclude by returning to where I started. Please bear with us, we Kenyans are just like that. We are products of our past.

Here’s why. We come from a tradition of struggle. Some 60 years ago, we kicked the Brits out of our land, and I mean that literally.

We humiliated what was then the most powerful nation on earth with nothing more than sticks and bows and arrows and njoras, to declare our freedom.

We still sing freedom, and demand it for Tundu Lissu.